Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 21, Issue 3, 2016

Generative syntactic theory of the past 35 years has developed from Government and Binding theory with its large set of articulated building principles, parameters and constraints into Minimalism with its small set of general principles and its reduction of syntactic variation to the Lexicon and Phonological Form. Hans Bennis’s syntactic work clearly mirrors this development. Also, since the nineties of the past century microcomparative syntactic research has become more prominent in generative syntax, e.g. in the work of researchers such as Richard Kayne and Cecilia Poletto, and Hans Bennis’s work is riding this wave as well. Both in the GB and in the Minimalist stage the textbooks that he (co-)authored have strongly influenced theoretical syntax in the Netherlands. The unique contribution of Hans Bennis and his research group at the Meertens Institute in the past 15 years involves the SAND project and the large amount of work building on it. By collecting massive amounts of dialect syntactic data in a theoretically and geographically systematic, and methodologically sophisticated way and by making them available, searchable and visualizable online, the empirical basis of theoretical syntactic research was greatly enhanced. This new research infrastructure makes it possible to address old questions in new ways and to ask new questions, e.g. about the relation between geographic distribution of grammatical properties and the Mental Grammar. The result is an integration of theoretical syntax and traditional dialectology, for the first time in the history of linguistics*

In this essay, I challenge Hans Bennis to rewrite his influential PhD-thesis Gaps and Dummies (1986) in function of evolved linguistic thinking about data collection issues, and the I-language vs. E-language dichotomy. More concretely, I dare him to renounce the generative garden of introspected generalizations, and face the jungle of spontaneously produced data, in order to fully appreciate the distributional complexity of existential constructions, and – more fundamentally – the functional motor of the grammar, or rather grammars of Dutch.

The past thirty years or so have seen an increased interest from the part of generative syntacticians in dialect data. The article addresses the question to what extent generative methods in studying dialect syntax depart from traditional dialectological methods, and whether both disciplines have been integrated successfully. Despite earlier pessimistic accounts like De Schutter (2005) and Goossens & Van Keymeulen (2006), Hans Bennis’ recent work shows that generative syntacticians are indeed adopting methods from dialect geography to tackle research questions that are still predominantly generative in nature.

This article examines the grammatical properties of the Dutch construction Kluns dat/die je bent! Specifically, it addresses the question of how exclamation is formally encoded in this construction. In line with Bennis (1998), it is proposed that exclamative force follows from an interaction between lexical properties of function words, on the one hand, and configurational structure (syntax), on the other hand. It is proposed that the dat/die-clause is a relative clause which is part of a larger vocative noun phrase containing a silent or overt 2nd person pronoun (the addressee). It is shown that the relative clause, and not the antecedent, is the locus of exclamation. The small word daar/d’r, which optionally appears in the relative clause, is analyzed as a surface manifestation (spell-out) of the LOCATION-feature (the distal property) that is associated with the relative (= distal) pronoun and the second person pronoun.

For a scholar like Arie Verhagen, with his relentless curiosity and irrepressible research drive, retirement is merely an academic rite de passage and never a real retirement. Even so, the symbolic change of state is a fitting occasion to take stock of what has so far been achieved – pending further original contributions and novel insights. The following pages will first present a chronologically ordered overview of Arie Verhagen’s linguistic work, and then bring out the importance of his contributions by briefly situating them in a wider context. In a very rough outline, the development of Arie Verhagen’s linguistic thought may be characterized in three stages. (The references in the following pages are meant to be exemplary only. Drawing up, let alone discussing a comprehensive bibliography is beyond the reach of the present overview.)

Verhagen’s thesis on the relative order of nominal arguments and sentence adverbials in the middle field of the clause argued that the order variation found in Dutch can be described in a more insightful way within a functional approach than within a formal, generative grammar. This was true in the 1980s, when generative grammar was concerned with competence only. In current generative grammar, however, the output of the computational system is interpreted and filtered by the performance systems, which opens the possibility of formally accounting for certain aspects of meaning and intonation. I will argue that this refutes Verhagen’s claim.

In contrast to written Dutch, spoken Dutch sees the sporadic emergence of a coordinating use of the subordinate conjunction omdat (‘because’). Starting from the paper by Persoon, Sanders, Quené & Verhagen (2010), this article aims at investigating the role coordinating omdat plays on the distinct levels of syntax, semantics, and discourse. Results suggest that coordinating omdat plays a discourse-specific role that is different from subordinating omdat.

Verhagen (2000) showed that Dutch causal connectives want (‘for’) and omdat (‘because’) differ in their intersubjective configuration: want expresses conceptual distance between speaker and other conceptualizers, while omdat does not. In this article we analyze how this difference is exploited stylistically in Dutch narrative fiction. We employ a combined model of subjectivity, mental spaces and domains to show that both connectives allow ironic readings, but in different ways. Want enables the implicit narrator to blend between different subjects’ viewpoints, whereas omdat enables him to show how individual subjects reason within themselves. Both cases result in intersubjective constructions that evoke naive or otherwise tragicomical narrative characters, placed at a distance from narrator and reader.